


Crux

by Tvieandli



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-08-26
Updated: 2013-08-31
Packaged: 2017-12-24 18:28:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 4,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/943222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tvieandli/pseuds/Tvieandli
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eren's power was wild. The kind of thing only a true lion tamer could harness. Mikasa was in her infancy, and her whip was too weak to properly break the skin of a titan's back. When they ran, the Legion followed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Thousand Nines

**Author's Note:**

> So this is still something I'm toying with. Heavy emphasis on Norse mythology here. Even more obvious than it is in the original content. I'm not sure if this will be anything more than a two shot, but I like the concept so it may continue. If you are someone who is up to the knees in mythology too, and you feel I've gotten something wrong, please tell me. I love feed back, and am not afraid to admit that there's a lot I don't know.

Seventeen thousand eight hundred seventy six. 

How many nines were there in that he wondered, tasting the wind. How many nines? How many full nines were there left? He wished he'd been better at counting. Erwin would know though. Erwin would tell him. 

The shifters were half way in between. Their souls split over the crux of Yiggdrasil, half on each side. A foot in two worlds. They were half breeds, but what was he? Was he the blood of some god that had bitten his thumb in a rage, and bled upon the earth? Was he the scion of some beast?

He felt a kinship with the forest. The throng of the world. It was strong there, where he ground his bare feet into the dirt, and let it all vibrate up through his legs. Erwin stood before him, holding that benign smile on his face. He sucked a breath in hard over his tongue, and tried to hold his solidarity. Sovereignty, he begged himself, but there wasn't any to be found.

When he'd been a child, his father had given him a cruel name. A name that tied him to others. One that meant dependance. He breathed deep, and forced the air from his lungs. He'd been a slave to that name for so long. 

Only now did he realize that still, in the empty air of his heart, he had the ability to choose to whom his ties were bound. 

He was a right hand. He was a force of will. He was not his own, but he could decide who's he was.

Seventeen thousand eight hundred seventy six.

There were one thousand nine hundred and eighty six whole nines left in the world.

He wondered how many of them knew it. Erwin truly was a rare catch. His eyes sparkled with hidden mirth the way the father's would have were they allowed to look on him. 

"They're in the forest," Levi said softly. 

"I know," Erwin replied. "Now be a good dog, and sniff them out."

Levi turned, and bent to the ground to feel the earth, connecting the circuit from his feet to his hands so that he was Daguz- the hour glass- the unending eternity. And through the earth, he seized the feeling of a full nine, grabbed it by it's heart, and mapped it in his eyes.

The shifters were in the forest, and the wolf could smell them.


	2. Mim's The Word

Eren felt the hair on the back of his neck stir. It was a sensation similar to the ones Mikasa sometimes caused when she stopped him dead. Something unnerving, yet attractive. He curled closer into himself. Something was mounting on the horizon that he didn't like.

Mikasa could feel it too, that much was clear from the look in her eyes- the way she stared at the fire. 

Something was thundering through the underbrush. Some force was strapping them to their seats. Armin was still speaking, voice drowned out by the sound of lightning breaking on the shore, a horn blaring in the depths of Eren's ears. 

A deck of cards flared out in his mind, and a hand drew the ace of Hearts from the center, inverting it into the ace of spades, the four of clubs. It would be something unexpected. 

Something horrifying, and intriguing. 

Someone sailed over Armin's head, and into the tinder, making it rain up. Eren recoiled, and covered his eyes with his arms to make sure that the flames couldn't reach his face. 

There was a man swathed in red, his dark eyes burning like kindling. Something wound around Eren's chest when he met that gaze, and then the hands were moving, lips was speaking silent words that felt like liquid silver on the back of Eren's tongue where they dripped down his throat. 

He couldn't move. Breathing came hard.

Mikasa screamed something out, but there was a man behind her, his hands on her shoulders, his words on her neck like incantations or a spell. When he was younger his father had once told him stories of silver tongued men who spoke in riddles, and could silence people with their words from miles away.

Armin was standing, but the man in the fire was baring his teeth like an animal.

"You're a child," something told him deep inside his mind. "Would it not be better to let yourself fall beneath the sway of Mim?"

Yes, he thought- not quite knowing what Mim was, or what was speaking in him- it would be better. It would be better to let someone else take it from here. It would be better to close his eyes.


	3. Van or Vanir

He was staring into the face of a woman when he woke up. Someone he didn't know. She was holding a syringe filled with blood in her latex gloved hands. There was a look of mirth on her face.

"He's up," she said in a chirp that was rather deep for the tone. Her glasses glinted in the light, and her arms flared with muscle as she pushed herself off the floor. "He's all yours."

The man from the fire stepped past her at about the same time that Eren realized they were moving. The surface beneath him was vibrating, and there was a seat by his feet that was brushing against the toes of his tennis shoes.

"Where are we?"

"In the van," the man said, bending down beside Eren. His dark eyes were narrowed. They hadn't been when he'd stood in the fire, and held his hand out to Eren in silent command. His voice was nothing like the voice it had seemingly been before. 

"We're going somewhere?" Eren asked.

The man looked over his shoulder to where the woman had slid into one of the seats. "Good news, Hange. He's a fuckin' genius."

Eren would have felt embarrassed in a less terrifying situation. "Where are Mikasa, and Armin?" he demanded.

The man looked over Eren's head, and Eren instinctively followed his gaze. They were both bound, and gagged with leather straps, sitting in silence, anger clear on their faces. Behind them was the man who'd spoken into Mikasa's ear to silence her. His blue eyes caught Eren's almost expectantly.

"You think you've got a good hold on him?" he asked, speaking to the man who had stood in the flames.

"You think your dick's gonna fall off next time you jerk one out?" 

Eren's throat constricted hard in reaction to the retaliation, and he choked on his own saliva.

"I'll take that as a yes. Can you get him to sit up so we can properly bind him?"

"Bind me?" Eren asked, but he was sitting up anyway. That voice was in his mind again, whispering soft commands. 

"Shut him up, Levi," another man said from the driver's seat.

Eren felt his mouth open wide, and his head turn to look at the driver. A shrill, and inhuman noise came out of him, and crashed around the cabin of the van. 

"You're a fucking asshole," was the only response given, and was apparently enough to get Levi to stop forcing him to screech. 

"We're almost there," the driver said. "Put him back out."

Black crept in from nowhere. He only really had the time to wonder if the same courtesy had been granted Mikasa, and Armin.


	4. A Bastard's Argument

Eren's power was wild. The kind of thing only a true lion tamer could harness. Mikasa was in her infancy, and her whip was too weak to properly break the skin of a titan's back. When they ran, the Legion followed.

That would have been the gist of it if there hadn't been a war on, and there was no interest from Nile. Erwin cleared his throat, and tried not to seem hostile. It was one thing to host a guest out of care. It was another to host a guest out of necessity.

"I understand that all you really care for is the well being of your escaped convicts, but the truth of the matter is that we have jurisdiction in a case with unexplainable undertones being as we are the only ones equipped to deal with these sorts of things," he said diplomatically.

Nile grit his teeth. "This isn't the X-files, Erwin. This "child" you're harboring has killed two people in the past, and is a flight risk. How can you be certain you're capable of taking preventative measures to ensure he doesn't break out, and kill again?"

"Levi has him."

Nile's face grew taught. "You can't just give people to Levi."

"And why not?"

"Because he'll rip them in two. He's a criminal. You can't control him either."

Erwin shifted in his seat, hardening his Northern Accent over the traces of softened, and elongated vowels that still remained in his speech. "Levi is a very capable person, and I trust him implicitly to handle the situation at hand without endangering anyone," he bit.

Nile's eyes darted away from his nervously.

"Are you really sure?"

"I'm positive," Erwin said. "There are things, Nile, that when we are entirely honest with one another, you will not be able to understand. They are simply beyond the world you live in. You were raised in America, drenched in Abrahamic religions, and modified Greek mythologies. You follow different paths based on arbitrary numbers while we draw nines on our walls over, and over, and leave food on our doorsteps hoping that things that are bigger than us don't want to come in.

"We live in very different places," he concluded.

"I've known you since grade school, Erwin. We were raised the same way," Nile protested.

"I had other influences."

Nile showed his teeth again, his annoyance exasperating the up town Georgian drawl that was natural in them both. "You're a sheltered rich kid, Erwin."

"I'm not so simple."

"Maybe. Or maybe you're just full of yourself, and trying to make everyone think you're some complex puzzle when the truth is you're not much more than what you appear to be."

Erwin didn't believe in demonstration for demonstration's sake, and so Nile remained fuming on his tall horse. "Come with me," Erwin said softly as he stood from the little metal table. Nile gathered up his folders, and did as he was bid.

Somewhere down the halls, Levi was testing the shifter boy while Hange watched, her Seer's vision swimming with numbers, and stories. Erwin lead him to them, and made him watch as Levi pushed Eren Yeager around a glass cell with not so much as a word of command.

"We live in very different places, Nile," Erwin said again as Mike slid a knife onto the cell's floor. Levi picked it up, and turned it over in his hands. 

"What's that?" Nile asked.

"A knife made from the finger bone's of a god's right hand after it was swallowed whole by a wolf. An artifact really. Titans like our Yeager seem to have an adverse reaction to it."

"Gods don't exist, Erwin," Nile said, never looking away as Levi turned to the boy, hands out stretched.

"You'd be surprised." 

Eren picked the knife up, and slid the blade against his palm unquestioningly. Vapor erupted from him, and Erwin was able to see the vague outlines of his morphing body through it. It was grotesque. Something unsavory, and worrisome. Nile made a sound like he was gagging on bile.

Eren was bigger than they thought he'd be in his true form, standing at something resembling ten feet. His lipless mouth hung open, green eyes blazing into Levi who looked tinier than ever before him.

"What is that thing?"

"In mythology they're referred to as Giants, and Etens. Practically we call them Titans. They are the race that fought the Æsir when Odin ruled over the northern countries," Erwin explained as Levi reached out his hand. Eren bowed on one knee before the tiny man, laying the bridge of his nose against Levi's outstretched palm.

"So this is what you're fighting?" Nile asked.

"The gods are waking up, Nile, and so are their enemies. Most of it isn't happening here, but there are rifts, and things are falling through."

Nile was silent.

"Do you believe me now?" Erwin asked.

Nile nodded. "We live in very different worlds," he conceded. "And I have no idea what it was that brought you into this one."

"Lineage," Erwin told him with a smirk. "Have I ever told you that I'm a bastard?"


	5. Map It Out

"So Nile let us keep him?" Levi asked, sprawling out lazily on the counter. He'd just washed his bare feet in the sink, and was waiting for them to dry in order to avoid slipping hazards on the linoleum. 

Erwin nodded softly. "He didn't really have a choice after your little performance."

"You're the one who told me to make it flashy," Levi accused. 

"True."

Levi's eyes curled up in amusement at the smile Erwin gave him. "You're never really happy with anything I do, are you?" he joked.

"Never," Erwin told him. Levi bit his cheek, and sobered then, thoughts turning in a different direction.

"Hange's been talking about the hunters," he said softly, eyes somewhere far away. He looked almost contemplative beneath his monochrome expression. 

Erwin knew instantly that he was referencing the shifters they'd really been looking for. They'd been so certain they were in that forest, but Eren was the one they'd found. Since then, Hange had been raving on, and on about how it almost seemed like their signals were tracking his. Trying desperately to capture him. She had used his blood in nearly countless spell workings already to make sure. 

The shifters were hunting their own. 

"What's she saying?" Erwin asked, pouring cereal into a bowl, and reaching into the fridge for the milk jug. 

Levi sat up with a heavy sigh. "She's saying we might be in for it. She's not sure, but it "feels" like plotting," Levi's fingers curled around the word "feels" cradling it in emphasis, and quotation. "I'm expecting you to out plot them." He said bluntly, swinging his legs over the edge of the counter.

Erwin glared at him over his cereal bowl. "You can't just expect me to out think everyone especially when I'm lacking information."

"Yes I can," Levi said flippantly, hopping off the counter, and starting toward the door. "You're your father's son, aren't you? Didn't he once out think the judicial system using a baby, and a knife, and have it work? You'll think of something. I have faith. And if you don't," he added, throwing a look over his shoulder. "I guess you can kiss my fealty good bye."

That was always Levi's threat. Erwin doubted it held any weight at this point, but that didn't mean it wasn't better to try, and keep it in check. Like he'd kept it in check, when he took close stock of the bottom of Levi's feet after he jumped head long into the fire, even when he knew that he was blood born to not feel a thing from it. Levi always had the ability to be surprising in some way.

He leaned his head back against the wall, mind already whirring with possibilities, and the known factors. He didn't have much honestly, but that didn't mean that he couldn't make it work. Levi was right. He would just have to Tim Gun it.

From somewhere in the back of his mind, his ties to his forefathers wrapped around his right arm, and he felt strength pulse through him. This would be a simple game of tag, he realized, pouring over the pictures in his mind, fitting them together on a tree of connectivity, mapping the world, and all the information he had.

They were fishing, and Eren was the bait. It was a simple solution for a complex problem. He pursed his lips around the idea, and rolled it over his tongue to get a feel for it before he set down his half eaten bowl of cereal, fully distracted by the minute specifics. 

The father who had raised him had always told him that the devil was in the details. Now he saw much more intimidating monsters there, coalescing in the shadows of the realities he had yet to plan for.


	6. Lost Ticket

She was far away from them, arms wrapped around her chest as she huddled over her ritual space. They knew better than to touch her at a time like this. These were old magics. They were born of the oral traditions of her family. Taught to her unfittingly by her father.

Perhaps, they'd joked once, he had a bit of Odin in him that caused him to tread on such feminine spells. She had grown angry, and offended at that. One did not suggest that the bastard children of the Jotun were related to the Æsir in this time. Despite the likely hood of their interbreeding at some point.

Reiner drew the rune of strength in the dirt, and ashes before him, and kicked it into oblivion several times. The fire that Eren, and his blood had built was dead now. It was clear he'd been taken, but not to where. There were footprints in the center of the ash. Small, like a girl's feet. Nearly as small as Annie's but bare. It was impossible to tell when they had gotten there in the fire's natural cycle, but it was easy to tell that whoever they belonged to had leapt. 

Then there were the footprints that belonged to Eren's brood. He couldn't tell which was which, but he could tell basically that those were them. And large footprints around the same size as Bertholdt's.

Annie had been distraught in a way they'd never properly seen her before. She'd paced around the scene back, and forth, and grabbed handfuls of the ash before dropping down a few feet away, and beginning to draw out rune designs, and interlacing lines.

"Who would even want to take him?" Bert asked the ground beside him.

"That's kind of what I'm wondering. I mean, I didn't realize Yeager was such a prize," Reiner said.

"He's one of us."

They both looked at Annie, leaned protectively over her spell work, hands tightening on the sides of her thin cardigan. 

"He's one of us," she said again. "That means he's worth something. He could be our ticket home."

There was an odd silence filled with more hands tightening on clothing, and the sounds of baited breath. There was no sound in the woods as they thought of the large fronds, and tree trunks of Jotunheim far away from them. The place they'd been told of all their lives as they were growing up.

Not once had they belonged in Midgard. Their souls ached for a home they'd never seen, sung with the promise of how close they were to reaching it.

"Who took him?" Reiner asked.

"I think it was the fox, and the Odin child," she said softly. 

The silence returned even stronger. They all knew about the fox. They knew about his silver tongue, and his bare feet slapping the ground. They knew about the Odin son who had risen to tame him, and they knew the number of their kin that had fallen under their hands. They knew it with desperate clarity.

"What do we do?" Bert asked. 

"We make sure they don't see us coming," Annie said. 

Reiner felt as though she were simply stating the obvious.


	7. A Simple Question

They hadn't seen Eren in four hours. Mikasa was fuming, her feet slapping the linoleum with a thick rhythm as she paced barefoot along the barred wall. Armin sucked a breath deep into his lungs, and tried not to compare her to an animal at the zoo that was lacking stimulation.

There was a man watching them, arms crossed over his chest, and hip cocked beside a woman who looked much more approachable. The only things that had been exchanged between the four of them were shouts of anger, and discontent between Mikasa, and the man.

Armin shifted, the rough fabric of the clothing they'd been provided with while theirs was cleaned scratching along his leg hairs, and catching on his back where he leaned against the wall. 

"Open the door," Mikasa hissed through the bars for the thousandth time. The man tutted, and the woman frowned. She at least looked remorseful for the position they'd been put in.

"I'm not opening shit."

Mikasa growled low in her throat, and slammed the heal of her palm against the iron, making it rattle.

"You watch yourself, cunt," the man said.

Armin watched with detached bemusement then as the woman, who was half his size, rounded on him, eyes blazing angrily, and punched him in the arm. "You are never allowed to say that to anyone!" she yelled, striking him a second time as the look of annoyed aloofness slid off his face to be replaced with what almost seemed to be nervous repentance.

"You sexist pig, Auro!"

"I'm not sexist!" he protested, holding his hands up in front of his chest.

"Don't lie to me! How would you like to be in their position, huh? How would you like to be stuck there waiting for your friend not knowing what happened to him for hours while people you didn't know held you captive? You're always trying so hard to be like Levi, so be like him, and show some fucking compassion!"

The quiet stole back over them then, Mikasa watching wide eyed through the bars as Armin tried to understand- The situation- The people- The separation.

There was a bit of a spark in him, speaking somewhere deep with in his mind telling him he didn't have the information. You can't do anything without the right information.

"What's your name?" he asked the woman outside their cell. The starting point in a labyrinth of knowledge was always a simple question.


	8. Small Comfort

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> About to be some important stuff next chapter btdubs

Eren woke up in a bed, comfortable, and warm with images of his mother's mangled corpse dancing behind the lids of his eyes when he blinked. He was alone, and somewhere nearby Armin, and Mikasa were being held- tortured- interrogated. He couldn't say for sure, rolling out of bed.

He was wearing foreign clothing. Not his own. In a room not his own. He clung to the door, and peered from the low light of the room out into the dark hallway. He couldn't see anything, so he tried the door handle, feeling as if her were trapped in some Silent Hill game. It was locked. He was trapped. He thought of the window, and rushed to it only to find it barred.

"We thought of everything, you know?" Levi's voice said into the back of his mind, words tickling along folds, and membranes.

Eren panicked, and grabbed the lamp of the night stand to use as a weapon. He blinded himself in the process, as it was the soft light source that lit the room.

"Relax, kid. I ain't even in the building right now. Bet you probably want to know where Iam though. I'm outside watching Hange sacrifice a goat, and man let me tell you, I've seen some intense death rattles before, but nothing like this. Hold your breath now, because it's about to shit itself."

Eren felt disgusted by the description. He wanted to run. Armin, and Mikasa could be anywhere. Anything could be happening to them.

"They're safe," the velvet version of Levi's voice whispered into his ears. It almost made him relax, but then he remembered why, and fought it. "Look, we're done here. I'll come back to you. I'll take you to them."

He was lying. Eren knew he was lying. He stood a while in solitude and then there was a short man unlocking the door. He hadn't realized lying on the floor of the van how small Levi was. How slight. He stared down at the man, not knowing what to say.

"So how do you like my bedroom?" Levi asked in his real voice, rough, and not nearly so nice. Tinged with some city accent Eren couldn't quite place.

Eren glared at him until he shrugged, and turned around. There was much less talking now that they were face to face. Almost as if Levi didn't feel he needed dialogue when he had physical action to replace it. It reminded Eren of Mikasa despite his best efforts to keep the man far from human.

Levi lead him down hallway after hallway, and several flights of stairs until he was tapping a petite, brunette woman's arm for seemingly no reason. 

"Hey, you fucks, I brought your boy toy," he said, addressing a cell. 

Mikasa, and Armin looked up at him, their faces washed out by the fluorescent lights, suddenly pulling into looks of excitement.

"Eren!" Armin exclaimed, scrambling off the little tablet bed, and onto the floor on bare feet. They were wearing the same clothing Eren was, sterile, and white.

"I'm so glad you're alright. There's so much I want to tell you. I have a theory-"

"Eren," Mikasa interjected. "Are you alright? Have they done anything to you?"

Eren opened his mouth to say something, but Levi put a hand on his shoulder, making him flinch away. "We had to run a few tests. Simple things really. He's no worse for wear. Now I hate to cut this moment short, but in order to properly convey what's happening right now, I'm gonna need mister cheekbones.

"So, you shit-face," he said, pointing an accusing finger at Eren's nose. "You're staying with Petra, and you're not gonna stir a single shit up while I'm gone or I'll know, and I'll know where to find you."

"You can read my thoughts, can't you?"

Levi waggled his hand a bit in the air, looking toward the ceiling as if her were trying to think of the best way to put it into words. "I can empathize vague concepts out of you, I guess," he said, before turning, and marching quickly down the hall.

Eren wanted to ask why he couldn't do that with "mister cheekbones" but he found himself unable to properly iterate that. Instead he moved closer to the bars, and let Armin, and Mikasa reach through them to make sure he was in tact. It couldn't hurt to allow them the slight comfort.


End file.
